The Girl Who Saved Christmas – by Matt Haig

23 12 2023

The second in Matt Haig’s Christmas trilogy, I correct myself slightly on what I said last year – the books are not completely separate. The boy in the first book is the adult Father Christmas in this book, but while there are a few call backs, it’s really not dependent on having read it, this stands alone well.

This is set in Victorian England, and as it’s a children’s book, of course we bump into Charles Dickens at one point, and crash into Queen Victoria’s bedroom in another (where she is sat up in bed wearing her crown – naturally).

The book follows the story of Amelia Wishart, a chimney sweep who early on loses her mother and is taken to the workhouse by a horrible man. This runs parallel to Father Christmas dealing with the lack of hope in the world and therefore lack of magic to power his sleigh, this is partly due a troll attack that stopped him from delivering last year at all!

So there’s a lot going on, the two stories obviously meet and overlap, and everything’s alright in the end.


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World History in Minutes – by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

6 12 2023

I picked this up as a way to give myself a quick overview of lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t like history at school (with a couple of exceptions for the Tudors and Victorians), but thought it would be good to give myself a basic education.

I don’t think this book was the right choice. A lot of the pages seemed to have a load of assumed knowledge on people/places/scenarios, so I didn’t have a clue what they were on about, there wasn’t enough explanation. It also had a large number of typos that a basic spell check would have picked up on, which made me question the quality of what I was reading too. Most pages had an illustration, be it photo, diagram, painting, but they were all in black and white, so when it was a map with a key, it was very hard to distinguish between various shades of grey.

It starts with pre-history and goes right through to the 2008 credit crunch. I particularly struggled with the early stuff, cos I found that I just didn’t care enough, which meant I had a negative attitude through most of the book, and combined with the quality issues mentioned above, I’m just very relieved to have got to the end and ticked it off – it took me a month! Not a book I’ll be keeping.


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The really useful guide to Kings and Queens of England – by Historic Royal Palaces

7 11 2023

I bought this book a few years ago I think, when I visited Hampton Court Palace, and thought it’d be interesting, but only just got around to reading it. Each king or queen has a double page spread with a picture or two, a quick fact file, “what kind of ruler?”, palace connections (because it’s published by Historic Royal Palaces (HRP)), and then some more wordy bits of info to give you an idea of their key points.

It was mostly good, definitely a decent way to get a general overview, or quickly look up someone specific. Just a couple of things bothered me:

Firstly, in my reading I found 2 typos and a sentence that had been written really clumsily, it just felt like it could have done with one more proof read.

Secondly, while this edition was published in 2016, and so obviously one monarch out of date, it refers early on to male succession without acknowledging that that law changed in 2013 and so is no longer the case (but does talk about Richard III being discovered in a car park that year, so the text has definitely been updated since then!).

The other thing that was a bit odd (but understandable) was the focus on their links with Kensington, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, and the couple of other properties under HRP, with links to other palaces (eg Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle) practically ignored, just a bit of a heavy weighting.

That all said, for me, as someone who really struggled with history at school, but would like to know a bit more now, this was pitched just right. Some high level details, enough basics for what you might want to know without being a heavy read. Bingo.


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Lessons in Chemistry – by Bonnie Garmus

29 10 2023

Another of the books that I’d seen everywhere, people seemed to rave about, it was on the shelf in the supermarket, so I grabbed it to try, and I’m glad I did!

It’s the 1950s and Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, specifically a chemist. It’s not an easy time to be a woman in science. She meets a man, a few things happen, which I won’t spoil, though he does get her into rowing, and then a few years later we find her as a single mother and unemployed. She ends up hosting a cooking show on TV, (because of course, cooking is just chemistry), but goes a lot more science-y and a lot less girly than her producers would like! There is so much more to it than this, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Her dog, “six thirty” is one of my favourite things about the book, she decides she’s going to teach him words, hundreds by the end of it, which sounds ridiculous, but it somehow seems reasonable, because after all, dogs are clever creatures! Sometimes the book tells things from the dogs perspective, and somehow it’s just the most heart warming parts of the book!

I really enjoyed this, have already passed it on for my mum to read!

One of my measures of writing I’ve enjoyed is when I’ve turned down a load of page corners, which I did with this, so here are some of my favourite lines:

“She certainly didn’t like favours. Favours smacked of cheating.”

“She continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”

“People were always insisting they knew what [fiction] meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning.”

“Not that there was anything wrong with being unattractive. She was unattractive and she knew it. […] But none of them were – or would ever be – ugly. Only [he] was ugly, and that was because he was unattractive on the inside.”

“As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day – a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.”

“‘Sure as death and taxes.’
‘Everybody dies. […] But not everyone pays their taxes.'”

“‘I think we both know, […] that God is just a bit different from Yahtzee.'”

“‘All dogs have the ability to bite. […] Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.'”

“The unrelenting burden of misunderstanding” – this sums up so much of the book, give it a go and you’ll see!


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A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English – by Shappi Khorsandi

19 10 2023

These days the author is known by her full first name of Shaparak, but I’ve just put Shappi in the title of the post as that’s still what’s printed on this book as it was published in 2009.

Shaparak was born in Iran in the 70s, and her dad was a satirist, which didn’t go down brilliantly with those in charge, hence them ending up in the UK. This autobiography covers that move and the adjustment to life in a foreign country as a child, as well as the problems back home where her extended family still are, and the fact that they might still not be fully safe even in London.

A lot of it is about adjusting to culture, at times the kids adjusting better than the parents and being embarrassed by them, and obviously the difficulty of being seen as different at school.

It’s heart-breaking in places, but told in a way that’s mostly light, just like she’s talking to you to tell her story.


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Hickory Dickory Dock – by Agatha Christie

17 09 2023

It was time for another Agatha Christie, and this was one I’d picked up in a charity shop last year, probably just because of the familiar title to be honest, though it had very little to do with the plot other than the name of the road the house is on from what I could tell!

The action takes place in a student hostel, I guess these days you’d refer to it as more of a house share but with a warden (it was published in 1955). Strange things have gone missing, some of value, some not at all. Poirot hears about this from his secretary, who is the warden’s sister, and is curious. The next thing you know, someone is dead, and there’s a lot more to investigate!


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A Man Called Ove – by Fredrik Backman

29 08 2023

Ove is the sort of grumpy old person I dream of being! He lives in a fairly quiet neighbourhood where no cars are allowed in the residential area, one of many rules he is very keen to enforce – without rules there would be chaos everywhere.

He is a man of routine: every morning he does an inspection of the neighbourhood to check that nothing is amiss. He checks all areas including the bike shed, the bin store, and the parking area:

“He detoured through the guest parking area, where cars could only be left for up to twenty-four hours. Carefully he noted down all the registration numbers in the little pad he kept in his jacket pocket, and then compared these to the registrations he had noted down the day before. On occasions when the same registration numbers turned up in Ove’s notepad, Ove would go home and call the Vehicle Licensing Authority to retrieve the vehicle owner’s details, after which he’d call up the latter and inform him that he was a useless imbecile who couldn’t even read signs. Ove didn’t really care who was parked in the guest parking area, of course. But it was a question of principle. If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that’s how long you were allowed to stay. What would it be like if everyone just parked wherever they liked? It would be chaos. There’d be cars everywhere.”

As we start the book, some new neighbours are moving in next door, and a stray cat is spending too much time around the area, neither scenario is something Ove is keen on.

Much more and I’ll be starting to spoil the premise, but hopefully this gives you a feel for him as a character, which for me was what made me keep picking up the book!

The only downside was a very stupid front cover which had the book name, and then above it the film poster where the titular character’s name has been changed for an American setting.


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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Original Screenplay – by J.K. Rowling

14 08 2023

More books like this and I might actually have a hope of reaching my reading goal this year – I’m currently vastly behind! It was a three day read, mostly because it’s just the script for a 2 hour film so doesn’t take long at all.

Like last time, it was hard to keep track of the characters because you’ve had no description of them, and no face to remember. I didn’t feel like I cared about the plot too much, I guess partly because of this, mostly just read it because it was easy to read and is part of the Harry Potter universe. It was fine, I’ll put it on the shelf with the rest.

We start in New York from last time, and travel via London to Paris, including a visit to Hogwarts, so there’s a bit more of the magical world to see, and a familiar face from the original series is back, just a lot lot younger – Professor Dumbledore!

I’m currently watching the film on a streaming service – they’ve just got to Hogwarts and that familiar refrain started playing, which was lovely.

Overall it’s fine, but maybe these prequels have just struggled by not having the depth of full novels behind them like the original books? They definitely don’t feel like they’ve been the same roaring success…. of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t read the next one eventually.


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Daisy Jones & the Six

11 08 2023

Anyone who read this book seemed to rave about it, so I wanted to give it a try, and they weren’t wrong!

It’s written in a really unusual style – the book is about the [fictional] rise and fall of the band The Six, and the singer Daisy Jones, but is written as interviews with everyone looking back on that time. It reads like one of those documentaries with a load of talking heads that tell the story with a very occasional narrator, really clever.

Because the interviews with the author are done separately, you sometimes get little bits of the story that contradict from person to person, which makes it more realistic really when they’re remembering that far back.

The story they tell itself is gripping, the life of rock stars in the 1970s, with all you would expect to come with that – I flew through the book.

The only slight downside for me (and slight spoiler warning here) was a little twist at the end that was somewhat reminiscent of How I Met Your Mother, which I had never really liked. But I’d only knock off maybe a quarter of a star off for that, as the rest was so good.


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The Bullet That Missed – by Richard Osman

31 07 2023

The Thursday Murder Club are back for book three!

This time they’re looking into a cold case of a young local news presenter who’d been killed a decade previously – and while they’re looking into this, Elizabeth starts receiving anonymous threatening messages…

It’s so weird how a murder mystery can be such a cosy read, but the characters are so warm and real (special mention for Joyce and her dog, Alan), and you can just feel Osman’s sense of humour and enjoyment of British idiosyncrasies throughout.

As with previous books, there’s not a lot I can say without giving spoilers, but I was up rather late last night as I read the last 50 pages or so, absolutely hooked!

My copy from Waterstones had a little bonus bit of content at the back, a little insight into Joyce’s side project in this book, which was a good bit of fun.

Some spoiler-free quotes from the book:

  • “The Thursday Murder Club? Sounds made up.” “Everything is made up, when you really think about it.”
  • “I just think that you can be very talented and have lovely hair. Perhaps I’m shallow, but both of those things are important to me. Claudia Winkleman is a good example.”
  • “Everyone wants to feel special but nobody wants to feel different.”
  • “If life ever seems too complicated, if you think no one can help, sometimes the right person to turn to is an eight-year-old.”

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